Kodak didn't get into cryptocurrency and bitcoin mining, "Kodak" did

Kodak’s CES announcements tell an interesting tale of the power of brands, and what happens to those brands when you start licensing them to other companies.

A lot of people still have positive associations with the Kodak brand and its iconic logos, but it’s worth clearing something up, especially in light of all the cryptocurrencymadness that Kodak unleashed at CES: not everything with the Kodak name on it has much connection to a bunch of clever people in Rochester New York.

The parent company, Eastman Kodak, left the consumer photography business in 2012 following court-overseen ‘Chapter 11’ restructuring. Its remaining consumer photo businesses were sold to Kodak Alaris, which continues to sell photo film and printing kiosks.

So it’s worth keeping your fond memories of that company at arms length when you read about its apparent embrace of the blockchain.

The "Kodak" KashMiner, yours to rent for just $3,400 and a two year contract.

At CES this year ‘Kodak’ announced both blockchain-based IP protection and cryptocurrency projects, and a scheme that apparently lets you buy a Bitcoin-mining farm for them. However, the KodakOne project appears to be as much a rebranding of an existing project called RYDE as it does a “partnership between Kodak and [RYDE owner] Wenn Media”. Meanwhile, the Kodak KashMiner scheme, which lets you rent the hardware to mine the more famous Bitcoin cryptocurrency appears to be entirely separate: essentially an unconventional investment scheme using industry-standard hardware with the Kodak logo stuck on the side so that there’s something to show at CES.

Essentially, these look a lot like Kodak licensing its name to other companies in much the same way as the current holders of the Polaroid, Rollei and Vivitar names accept fees to let those names get emblazoned on, well, pretty muchanything.

Eastman Kodak still makes film, but it appears to have only two customers: the motion picture market and Kodak Alaris.

The Kodak PixPro Orbit360 4K VR camera, by JK Imaging

Then, of course, there are the cameras. You can still buy ‘Kodak’ cameras: JK Imaging, a California-based company, sells cameras under the Kodak brand. Interestingly, JK Imaging shares an address with General Imaging, which licensed the General Electric brand for its photo products.

Given the way that even the largest names in photography regularly use third-party ‘OEM’ manufacturers to produce some of their models, it’s senseless to try and draw a line between ‘real’ Kodak and licensees of the brand name. That the red and yellow logo doesn’t necessarily tie anything back to your fuzzy memories of Kodachrome, or brilliant developments such as the Bayer color filter.

Comments

"Eastman Kodak still makes film, but it appears to have only two customers: Hollywood and Kodak Alaris."

That's odd, Last week I bought 8 400' rolls of 16mm (and a couple hundred rolls of Super8 BW a couple of months ago) from Kodak in Rochester, not Alaris, And I'm not in hollywood, I'm and Seattle and neither are we making feature films or TV series. Yes Hollwood buys up the lion's share of film (fortunately, keeping the production runs alive for the rest of us) but they're hardly the only customers of Kodak in Rochester.SteveSeattle Film Institute

Those old Canon PCs came in pretty sturdy cases. One of my friends got a dead Canon PC, removed its guts, and re-housed his Amiga 4000D into the Canon case. This looked far cooler and had a lot more space inside than the rebadged Commodore Colt PC cases into which they shoehorned Amiga 4000D computers originally.

Comments can be deleted of they're overtly offensive or just look like attempts to aggitate ("why was my post deleted" comments tend to be removed, too). I can't see any sign of one of yours being deleted, though.

Is there a chance you're thinking of the one left on the story about the "Kashminer"? If so, that's still there.

It's your fault for calling all these products Kodak or Polaroid or GE, etc. in the write-ups and reports., instead of saying a Kodak-branded camera from X,Y,Z Company, etc. You folks do it all the time.

The problem is that it's not always easy to draw that line. If a company licenses a name, then the value of that agreement would be undermined if they made the distinction between Kodak and 'Kodak' was too overt. So we don't always know.

For example, the smallprint suggesting some of these projects are collaborations between Kodak and whoever (with speculation about using a Kodak powerplant for cheap electricity?). So how would we classify that?

Furthermore, for several years, it became increasingly clear that a couple of the big camera makers were sourcing their compacts from a third-party manufacturer. We don't know how much input they had beyond saying 'make sure the colours look like this.' Should those be marked as 'such and such-branded?' What about the lenses Sigma makes (and in some cases, designs) for other manufacturers? Should we just list the ones we're certain about?

We'll have this conversation internally but it's not quite as simple as it sounds.

In our past stories we've tried to make the distinction between Eastman Kodak, Kodak Alaris (the photo film company) and JK Imaging (the digital camera company licensing the name), but this article is an attempt to recognise and communicate that the story just got a lot more complicated.

Maybe it’s time to realize that Kodak doesn’t mean anything anymore. You could really stop writing about products just because they wear the name Kodak. I don’t know whether one should go so far and take the Kodak name as a warning sign *not* to cover it on this website, but if it’s obviously not related to photography like the bitcoin gadget, then why write about it? You don’t write about other bitcoin mining hardware either.

Same is true for Motorola. If a product says 'Motorola', it's unlikely that product is from the original company. They just license the brand. Virtually all the "old-guard" US consumer electronics brands are re-licensed to Asian companies now.

Well, if you start licensing your name in every direction, do not expect that people will keep respect to you or whatever you do. They will not dig, whichever one of your subsidiaries is "true", and which of them is "not exactly", simple as that.

There was an official declaration of this change in their press release... or whatever such public statements are called. Don't have a link handy, but it should google up easily. All modern Zeisses are no longer Carls. Not only those which are Sonys.

Soooo......, it's kind of like identity theft. Except, the usage of the name is consensual and thus the 'parent' company should expect full ramifications, good or bad, from whatever use the name is put to. At the end of the day, Kodak, ie, Eastman Kodak, will shoulder the fallout from this fiasco, (and also possibly reap the benefits, if only improbably......)

I don’t think there is such a thing as consensual theft. In fact, in The Netherlands, one of the first questions police ask when your house has been burgled, is if you gave the person permission to enter your house and take your stuff.

It is not at all identity theft. A company came to the company that owns the rights to the Kodak name, pitched them a product, and negotiated the use of the Kodak brand for that product. A contract ensued ... it was a business deal.

You two have obviously missed the point I was trying to make. If your identity is stolen, the unauthorized use of your name still comes back to you. This is the same consequence that Eastman Kodak will face by licensing the brand name 'Kodak' for such dubious products as crypto-currency mining.

No, Kodak's identity wasn't stolen. It was given consensually. But at the end of the day, Kodak, ie, Eastman Kodak, will be burdened with the fallout from this fiasco.

THIS!People are getting tricked into that awful product, really funny how a brand can cloud people's sense of judment, if that was a random Kickstarter most of the positive comments would be trashing over the obvious flaws on that thing

That was pretty obvious by looking at the Amazon link. But if they put a useful package together and stand by it, that is worth something. I expect not every OEM compact camera is made an OEM in the traditional sense of manufacturing, but that ship has longed sailed. This is why 3rd party Micro 4/3rds systems can so quickly appear.

No. If they were, they would also be being more choosy about who they let license their brand. Kodak Alaris must think that the value in the Kodak brand is almost totally played out now, so there’s no reason for them to have standards. Nothing left to preserve.

Oh yeah, I had them mixed up. I misread the article and thought that Alaris was the brand licensing company and Eastman was the legit-but-not-consumer-facing photo equipment company. I see now that it’s the other way around.

A Trademark never was a guarentor of anything but that in theory only the owner of the trademark would use the name. This isn't even true as you can use the same Trademark if you are in a different enough business anyway and there also counterfeit on top of that.

Lastly it doesn't prevent the trademark owner to change their mind or from losing control.

In the 19th Century Trademarks were intended as a sign of quality, as people sold some appallingly doctored products (flour with much chalk added, etc.) when the local shop just handed you a bag of stuff they weighed out for you.

But either you have an undervalued brand and want to improve it and then you provide your customers with something better than the brand recognition you have would make them expect or you already recognised and you put the minimal effort to not destroy it and so are bad value...

In other words, both the company and customers pay for the trademark but this is no silver bullet.

So Kodak is a zombie brand now. Just a name and logo that anybody with a few bucks can license and slap on their crap to help it stand out among the sea of generic, no-name garbage on Amazon. Or among the sea of me-too cryptocurrency grifters, it would seem. Sad to see the tattered remains of such an iconic organization being paraded around like this. It’s undignified.

No, there is still a company (primarily engaged in the packaging industry and manufacturing filmstock for Hollywood and Kodak Alaris) based in Rochester. However, this company (Eastman Kodak) seems to also have a fairly active licensing division.

Sure, but that’s not the company that most people are going to see and interact with. To a retail consumer, Kodak is now just a name that factories in China license and stick on whatever they think could benefit from the brand recognition, much like with the cheap Polaroid and Vivitar lens filters that you can find on Amazon. Kodak sure doesn’t seem very choosy about who they license their brand to, at any rate.

I think 'made under licence for Kodak Alaris' might be a more accurate phrasing.

My understanding is that Eastman Kodak sold its consumer film business to Kodak Alaris to settle some of its debts, it just happens to still have the manufacturing site. Kokak Alaris is the continuation company of the one that you bought film from, Eastman Kodak is now a supplier to them.

Richard: maybe, but since Eastman Kodak still makes motion picture film (at least for now!) my understanding is that it simply kept that manufacturing facility for both of these closely-related product lines, and that the still films produced are all "Eastman Kodak" designs. AFAIK there has not been a new "Kodak Alaris" film introduced. Even the new, slightly updated, Ektachrome revival is being produced for motion (8mm) as well as stills, so it is almost certainly designed by Eastman Kodak.

That is, both the design and the manufacturing of these films are by Eastman Kodak: that is the quality guarantee that I was alluding to.

Without more insight into exactly which assets and staff went where, it's impossible to start apportioning credit. Is Ektachrome being developed primarily for stills or movies? Which company is driving the development? Who got which engineers? Without inside information about this, it's impossible to say where the bits of the legacy Eastman Kodak company (which did much of the designing) ended up.

Ultimately we know that the historical film business is now a separate company called Kodak Alaris, but that the product is manufactured for them by their supplier, Eastman Kodak.

It seems like a fairly complicated situation, but no matter what angle I look at it from it looks like a pretty sorry state of affairs. It would be nice if someone could buy the film-producing parts of the company and keep them alive under a new name (although I wonder how profitable that side of the business is, and for how much longer—making film is much more expensive than just licensing your brand) while the rest of this mess just sinks quietly out of sight. Licensing their name to cryptocurrency shysters is a pretty low ebb for such a famous and beloved company.

anticipation_of: that's essentially what happened. The problem is that they didn't buy the movie filmstock business too, which means there are some supply agreements that avoid having to duplicate manufacturing facilities.

Richard: correct me if you know otherwise, but AFAIK:(1) The motion picture film business was retained entirely by Eastman Kodak.(2) There is no evidence that Kodak Alaris has acquired any film development or manufacturing assets: it is purely an intermediary between the film manufacturer and the market.So I am quite confident that the new 8mm Ektachrome movie film, along with _all_ Kodak branded film, is both developed and manufactured by Eastman Kodak.

1) Probably. It depends how much overlap there was between the motion picture and the consumer film businesses.
2) it's public knowledge that EK retained the manufacturing facilities. I don't think we can speculate about development. Kodak Alaris bought the consumer film business, not just the distribution rights.

You mean, those clever people that thought in the ~90's, "ehh, this whole digital thing is just a fad, it will never match the quality of film; we're going to continue focusing on what we do best, because the film market isn't going anywhere."

Kodak and Fujifilm were responsible for early development of the CCD sensor. It's not like they stood by and watched it happen. They dug their own grave. Kodak would still be in photography had they had a serious camera line-up but they hadn't they focussed on cheap compacts and we all know what happened to them.

LobbaMobba: "Film cameras even outsells digital these days thanks to instax." Thanks for a glorious illustration of the ever-popular idiocy of comparing unit sales rather than sales revenues or profits.

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